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Comment by jsbisviewtiful | Hacker News Reader

I know it sounds very “old man yells at cloud” but I truly miss many parts of the old internet, when YouTube was new and social media was still in its fledgling phase. There are a lot of perks and quality of life improvements thanks to all the advancements, but being subjected to 4 ads per 11 minutes on YouTube, Google being much less useful thanks to SEO optimization and all the self-indulgent self- promotion on just about every site has gotten incredibly old. It’s all so boring and repetitive yet seemingly impossible to escape.

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That’s not really what I meant. Ads rarely get through my Adblock anyways. No, the problem with the dead internet isn’t that powerful entities flooded it with artificially generated bullshit, the problem is that the hyper commercialization incentivized real, living people to behave like inauthentic robots, mindlessly maximizing everything they do to drive engagement metrics.

Grab YouTube premium to not see ads. You have to pay for it somehow, either you watch ads for free or you swap out your LTV for cash by just paying outright.

This isn’t a mark of degradation at all. “Back in the day” of non-monetization isn’t sustainable for any decent length of time because eventually the people donating (VCs) will want a return or will run out of money.

You act like they NEED to make every video have 5000 ads. It wasn't that bad before when you watched a short ad. But now they are just shoving them in your face. Go look at how much profit they made and tell me that increasing the ads to proposterous amounts was necessary.

I’m definitely not in favor of capping the amount of profit a company can make.

If they are raising prices (amount of ads shown) and people continue to pay then I can’t fault them for it.

As I type this I realize that both you and the person I was originally responding to are just expressing that you don’t like the price increases. Which is totally fair.

Are there truly no ads? Have been putting it of thinking it just removes the google injected ads, but keeping all the promotions and such

There are no ads at all provided by YouTube. Obviously Google can't prevent content creators from embedding their own ads, which is becoming increasingly common.

> Obviously Google can't prevent content creators from embedding their own ads

Of course they could, just make it part of the service agreement.

I would feel much inclined to pay for youtube if they filtered out all ad-funded content.

Even better, they could have a model where content creators for the paid service got their piece of the revenue based in quality metrics rather than quantity metrics.

Sponsorblock[1] works pretty well for the creators’ advertisements.

[1] https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock

I use this when I'm watching Youtube on a computer, but that's by far the minority of my usage.

Adblock availability is the reason I watch exclusively on a laptop.

You can also watch on mobile using FF instead of the app

Take a walk into the past and use the before: after: operators on youtube. I have recently and discovered the past feels rosey but the amount of content, length, quality keeps increasing. When you go back the rooms feel much empier

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